Before The Killing Starts (Dixie Killer Blues Book 1) Read Free Page A

he
have to think it before he got up and walked out and hoped next time she left
it ten years before she came looking. In fact, make that twenty.
    Talk about a prisoner
of hope.
    'Have you got a picture
of him?'
    She fished in her bag
and pulled out half a photograph. It had started out as a photograph of two
people but one of them had been cut out. It looked as if it had been taken
somewhere hot and sunny and he could see a woman's arm but that was all. He
wondered if Ellie was the other person and she didn't want him—or anyone else—to
know it.
    'Was that you who's been
cut out?' he asked.
    'No.'
    'Really?' He leaned away
from her and studied her for a moment. 'Because that'—he pointed very carefully
at the dimples of cellulite pocking the white flesh under the woman's arm in
the photo—'looks like your arm.' He chewed on the inside of his mouth to keep a
grin from breaking out.
    Her self-satisfied smile
evaporated and was replaced with a look like she’d sat on a hot coal. She shot
him a look of such hatred and contempt, it gave him goosebumps. At least she
had the presence of mind not to glance down at her arm.
    He gave a small it
was worth a try shrug and topped it off with a smug smile. He felt much
better. 'Do you know who it is?'
    'No.' She shook her
head. Not no, sorry , just no.
    He smiled again as if to
say he'd have been surprised and disappointed by any other answer. He'd find
out who it was if he needed to, but the cellulite would never go away. Ha,
ha, ha.
    'There's no risk of me
drowning in a sea of facts then.'
    She climbed off her
stool and picked her bag up off the bar, ready to go. That suited Evan just
fine; he hadn't been about to offer her another drink anyway. He gave her his
number and she punched it into her phone as if he'd given her the number for dial-a-cockroach .
He watched her in the mirror behind the bar as she walked back towards the
door. He was pretty sure she stole a quick look at her arms in the mirror as
she went. A number of the other guys were watching her too, all sitting in a
line at the bar like grinning idiots. One of them picked up his beer bottle and
blew a hollow toot with it. You couldn't blame them—she was good to look at
after all, in a selfish, manipulative bitch sort of way.
    He ordered another beer
and sat staring into the distance, wondering how likely it was that a person,
even one as narcissistic as Ellie, would wait five years before telling her
best friend's husband what she knew about her disappearance. Unless the best
friend had asked her not to, of course . . .
     
     

 
     
    Chapter 4
     
    Dixie didn't say anything. He just sat
quietly and waited for Chico to finish. The way things were looking, he should
probably have brought a pillow.
    Chico was an evil son of a bitch,
although you couldn't really blame him for turning out that way. He'd been
unlucky enough to be born in 1951 which meant that he was seventeen years old
in 1968. That was the year the movie Once Upon a Time in the West was
released and the patrón of the local Hacienda—José Salgado—went to see it in Mexico City. It would have been much better for the young Chico and his family if the
patrón had visited when Planet of the Apes or Bullitt was
showing, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Shit happens , as they
say.
    The patrón was an
impressionable man despite his standing and he came away from the movie with
his head full of ideas. Unpleasant ideas, as if there weren't enough of those
in there in the first place. Chico's father wasn't to know any of that, of
course, when he stole a pig that year.
    So it was that when the
patrón and his men turned up at the shack where Chico lived with his family and
took Chico—the eldest son—and his father out into the desert, the patrón had
something very specific in mind. Under the branches of a Desert Ironwood tree, Chico's hands were bound behind his back and his father stood on his shoulders, also bound,
with a noose around his neck,